New York City Is Set to Adopt New Approach on Policing Minor Offenses

New York City is poised to reshape how it treats many so-called quality-of-life offenses, softening its stance toward low-level infractions like public urination and drinking alcohol in public by steering those cases away from the criminal court system.

A package of eight bills to be introduced in the City Council on Monday would reduce the impact of the style of policing known as broken windows that has for two decades guided the Police Department to see minor disorder as a precursor to major crime, often alienating residents in the process.

Under the legislation, New Yorkers given tickets by the police for offenses such as violating city park rules, a misdemeanor now, would in many cases be steered to a civil process rather than criminal court.

The Police Department has scaled back its aggressive enforcement of low-level offenses as crime fell to record lows in recent years. But Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, and the police commissioner, William J. Bratton, have said they are committed to the approach, and officers still write hundreds of thousands of criminal summonses a year.

Offenses covered by the legislation would not be decriminalized, as critics had accused the City Council of seeking to do when the proposal emerged last year. Instead, officials said, the bills, known collectively as the Criminal Justice Reform Act, seek to balance the goal of fairer punishment, laid out by Melissa Mark-Viverito, a Democrat who is the Council speaker, with the Police Department’s desire to maintain the discretion that officers use in making arrests, for even seemingly trivial offenses, when they deem it necessary.

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Discarded MetroCards at the Times Square subway station. Littering would be among the low-level offenses covered by a package of bills the New York City Council plans to take up shortly.CreditMarilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

“We know that the system has been really rigged against communities of color in particular,” said Ms. Mark-Viverito, who has promoted such reforms and is the main sponsor of the bills. “So the question has always been, what can we do in this job to minimize unnecessary interaction with the criminal justice system, so that these young people can really fulfill their potential?”

The approach is also meant to address two persistent problems that have bedeviled the judicial system: hundreds of thousands of low-level offenders clogging the criminal courts, and the outstanding warrants that result when those offenders fail to appear in court. Mr. de Blasio and state court officials have tried to address the same problem, altering criminal court procedures to expedite cases and to reduce the number of warrants.

The bills cannot address the way the courts treat minor crimes covered under state law, such as marijuana possession. Instead, they focus on several types of offenses covered by the city’s administrative code, including littering, public urination, public consumption of alcohol, excessive noise and breaking certain park rules.

Such violations, while minor, made up a huge portion of the roughly 300,000 criminal summonses issued by city officers last year, many of them written in minority neighborhoods where the police must also address more serious crimes.

In 1995, Mr. Bratton opposed an effort by state lawmakers to remove minor offenses — like public urination and drinking — from the criminal courts completely. Police officials argued at the time that doing so would hamstring officers who, without arrest powers, could no longer compel those given tickets for minor crimes to divulge their real names. This difference this time, police officials said, is that the criminal courts remain an option.

“We have been supportive of having a civil option for the police,” said Stephen P. Davis, the Police Department’s top spokesman, who said he had not reviewed the new legislation. “It provides us more discretion.”

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The Council bills seek to reduce the impact of heavy policing of offenses like the public consumption of alcohol while preserving officer discretion to make arrests.CreditMichael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

The bills come after nearly a year of talks among the Council, the de Blasio administration and the Police Department, with input from the parks and health departments, Ms. Mark-Viverito said. Health officials, for example, agreed to repeal a section of the department’s rules that forbids public urination and defines it as a misdemeanor. Under the proposed legislation, that offense would be covered only by the city’s administrative code, which would treat it as either a civil offense or a criminal violation.

The issue of public urination became a subject of intense public debate last summer as New Yorkers began to notice more homeless people on the streets. Some elected leaders balked at the idea of reducing penalties for the offense, even as they supported doing so for other infractions.

The Police Department would set the rules for when its officers issued each sort of summons, something that had yet to be made final, Council officials said.

“Where appropriate, the civil option is probably going to be the go-to option,” Mr. Davis said. “But you have to have the criminal option available.”

Councilman Rory I. Lancman of Queens, a Democrat who is a sponsor of the bills, said the package would not be approved until the Council received “the guidelines that the Police Department is going to follow in deciding how to channel people into the civil justice system as opposed to the criminal justice system.”

But with the speaker supporting the bills, and the Police Department backing the approach in principle, it appeared to stand a good chance of passage.

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Those who break park rules, like these skateboarders in Washington Square Park after hours, would be among those affected by the proposed Council legislation.CreditBéatrice de Géa for The New York Times

A spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio said in a statement that the mayor looked forward to discussing the details of the legislation with the Council and would “continue to work closely” with Ms. Mark-Viverito.

“The mayor has made a clear commitment to reducing unnecessary arrests while protecting the quality of life of all our residents,” the spokeswoman, Monica Klein, said in the statement, highlighting a drop in arrests for marijuana possession since Mr. de Blasio took office.

Under the proposed legislation, police officers would be encouraged to issue civil summonses to New Yorkers for public urination and the other affected offenses. Those accused of such violations would then go to a civil court run by the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, where they would face fines and civil judgments rather than warrants and jail time. In most cases, the fines would range from $25 to $250 for first-time offenders.

The Police Department already issues thousands of summonses that are handled in such courts, often for code violations related to street vendors. The police also use a civil option with bicyclists on the sidewalk, writing tickets that send many to traffic court unless they directly endangered pedestrians, and with first-time turnstile jumpers in the subway, who often go to a civil transit court.

The cost of making the proposed changes, which would require a significant expansion of the administrative court system, must still be worked out, Ms. Mark-Viverito said. She added that the city would also reap savings in the form of reduced jail and police resources.

The bills would also provide an avenue for indigent offenders to perform community service rather than pay fines when appearing before an administrative judge.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: New York Is Set for a New Tack on Little Crimes. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe